Cybersecurity startup Dawnguard has announced its emergence from stealth mode with $3 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by 9900 Capital with participation from angel investors including scale-up founders and cybersecurity executives.
The company was founded by CEO Mahdi Abdulrazak and CTO Kim van Lavieren, both veterans from organizations including IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, and military cybersecurity operations. The founding team brings experience in large-scale security programs and expertise at the intersection of security, AI, and cloud technologies.
Dawnguard's platform focuses on embedding security controls directly into system architecture during the design phase, rather than adding security measures after deployment. The company's approach integrates AI and machine learning engines across IT infrastructure lifecycles to identify potential security issues before systems go into production.
The platform targets security architects, DevOps engineers, and cloud teams working in cloud-native environments. Key features include validation of cloud infrastructure designs pre-deployment, automated generation of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) from validated designs, and continuous monitoring to prevent security configuration drift after deployment.
The funding will support expansion of Dawnguard's engineering team, development of enterprise integrations, and broader production deployment of the platform. The company plans to extend its platform to support more dynamic environments and address security challenges in AI-driven development workflows.
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Industry leaders expressed support for the company's approach. "Our industry treats security as a checkbox. It's broken," said CEO Mahdi Abdulrazak, while CTO Kim van Lavieren noted that "Dawnguard closes the gap between design and reality." Investor and Dutch Railways CISO Dimitri van Zantvliet commented that "Dawnguard isn't just building tech, they're rewriting the DNA of cybersecurity," and 9900 Capital Managing Partner Chris Corbishley added that "hundreds of security tools overwhelm CISOs with promises of better detection, yet few tackle the root issue: design flaws in code that AI-driven threats exploit."
The company positions itself as addressing what it sees as fundamental limitations in current cybersecurity approaches, which typically involve reactive measures rather than proactive design-level security integration.
